COME OUT, CAMPBELL.

GET YOU, SWEETIE.

Writing soft porn is no job for a proper man, not at all, it is the sort of thing that a politician might do, they'll do anything for a few quid, they know not Shame or embarrassment. Mark Oaten, Neil and Christine Hamilton, Tony McNutter, there is a huge cast of political grotesques, these are people short-circuited in their ethics wiring. In the case of Big Ali, he's a politician's stooge and a former tabloid hack, not even of the standard of Toilets Maguire or Kneepads White or Last Chance Polly; it seems right, his CV; dishonest, misleading, rarely even titillating, soft porn is neither fish not fowl, its peddlers cowardly, its consumers desperate for another's phoney, humdrum fantasy, soft porn does for adult sexuality what NewLabour does for politics - gives it a bad name. Politics or porn, the only core is hard core.

If the wretched, blubbering Campbell had coughed to writing - or better still starring in - the real thing one could kind of admire him, as it is, that the erstwhile second most powerful man in the country once wrote miserable, lonely babywank is entirely, predictably in keeping with, emblematic of the coterie of greedy rotten wankers, jerking the British body politic to spasming death.

Campbell, the big girl, wrote in the seventies for Forum, a right load of old bollocks, feigning respectable psycho-sexual investigation, an agenda of liberation and a soupcon of airbrushed plastic totty in the Playboy mould. Ali was stooging then for another alpha male, publisher Bob Guccione, the owner of Penthouse magazine - and Forum - and a desperate wannabe Hugh Hefner. Under the guise of promoting sexual liberation, Bob commodified women as had none before in the UK, with Penthouse clubs where eratsz bunnies walked around in their underwear, in the best possible taste, for the delectation of the the superior half of the population, in which we must count the tearful fag, Campbell. There were Penthouse keyrings, Penthouse sheets, Penthouse driving gloves, there was shitloads of clobber and fragrances and trash, just the thing to make consumer morons value their good Penthouse taste, discerning, Epicurean. And mountains of tits, so's they could have a wank, too. This was Campbell's raison d'etre, to help people have a wank.

Proper pornography is, as Lilith mentioned here a while ago, both fascinating and sickening, it has been around for ever and ever, Amen, and is part of every culture, the Greeks and Romans celebrated it, in India they still do, hidden, even now, in the UK, top-shelved, the word itself, porn, comes freighted with judgement, as though it wasn't, somehow, the biggest event on the Internet, America's second or third biggest industry. The biggest Pavlovian response in history, mention porn and people suck-in their breath, tut-tutting, frowning disapproval and hoping fervently that Operation Ore doesn't have their credit card details. But Campbell porn is miserable shit, like a lemonade shandy or decaffineated coffee, pisspoor and indifferent, like himself.

I guess there is a distinction to be made between erotica and porn but I wouldn't want to make it and there is a further sub-division which I would, if I could, enforce - brutality, bestiality, paedophilia and snuff - and which is outside what I understand as porn and really should be banned, if that's possible. Some of the things people do are amazing, that they record it and show it to other people, either for fun or profit, is the stuff of Ruin. But just because the bestial is abroad as never before shouldn't make Campbell's former ouevre a laughing matter, neither here nor at Chez Ali. Campbell's common-law mrs is fiercely, tiresomely correct, too correct, even, for the Downing Street sofa, with Tony and Imelda, too correct to be Imelda's paid best friend, a post filled catastrophically by Carole, a former brass.

Cherie's paid best friend, Carole.
Out, doing some shoe-shopping.

Maybe Fiona, sacked eventually from Imelda's Court, found her Guardianiste correctness and the rottenness of the Blair-Brown-Campbell-Mandelstein project just too so irreconcileable, poor love. We'll never know quite what happened with Fiona and Imelda and Tony and Big Ali but what we do know is that he is a coward, a hypocrite and a bully, his frequent outbursts of blubbering and paranoia more attuned to Lady Sir Elton John's Tantrum School than to a mature heterosexual in a loving relationship. Maybe Fiona said to him, it's either me, sweet thing, or this gang of crooked, sceeching fags . You can always go back to your writing. It must, though, be hard for Fiona, Mummy, people at school say Daddy wrote for jizz mags, what's a jizz mag? It's like we say, darling, in NewLabour and the Guardian, pornography debases all involved in it. Apart from Daddy. It's as rich as Diane Lard sending her brat to Eton, or wherever it is.

The Blair Project was memorably prefaced by Tony insisting that he wouldn't consider it accomplished until everyone loved Peter Madelstein as much as he did. At that time we were led to believe that Pete was straight, Ali was straight, that Gordon was straight and that the prime minister was a pretty, straight guy. Brown, somehow, was able to, eventually, engineer the removal of the duly elected prime minister of the UK, how did that happen; without even being a member of the House of Reptiles the unwholesome and disreputable Mandelstein was able to return - after bribery, corruption and consorting with gangsters - to British politics, straight-in as Joint Prime Minister; an ill-lettered hack, bad-mannered drunk and depressive was able to cut and paste a cassus bellus from the Internet and place it before the legislature as heavy-duty fact, and he remains uncensured, let alone punished. And yet he whines, Ali, like a bitch on heat. He's left the stage, but he hasn't, he has more money than ever a third-rate wank merchant might have expected and there he is, with his mate the polygamous Jock mutant, Marr - Oh, fuck me, Andrew, it's so hard for me, forgve me, dear; I'll be alright in a minute, it's okay for real men to cry, isn't it.? Aye, Fagotty Ali, OK for Iraqi kids, too, when there's napalm raining down on their playground. This is the thing with closet gays, lose all sense of proportion, the poor lambs.

It has been my contention, one of them, that bribery, blackmail and deceit have governed us these last thirteen years of Ruin. What actually happened, with Blair, why did he go, why did he never sack the saboteur, Brown? How can the somnolent dumbfuck, Badgerman, refuse to be moved from the Lesbian Treasury? What hold does Mandelstein have over the inner circle and why on Earth did the Cabinet leave the decision about invading another country effectively in the unchallenged, grimy hands of a press secretary, why did they allow Campbell to publish and broadcast his pornography of war? This is more than the usual cowardice of the political caste, this is some cabal of dark intriguers, motivated not by principle but by fear of exposure and Campbell, bitching and threatening, professing his undying love for Blair, seems often - as distance lends a sharper scrutiny - to be coming apart at the seams.

I can't recall one single incident of incompetence or greed or immorality among Labour's High Command being met with instant dismissal; the public was expected to swallow any amount of shit, even the side-lining of the bad news-burying Jo Moore seemed to be a bit of an in-joke, everybody smirking as she sort-of apologised; Byers. an unparalleled fuckwit, continues to bluster his competence from the backbenches, as though his eventual reluctant resignation was just window-dessing, he's still in the tent, pissing out; Prescott, a bloated, cock-waving bully and sexual predator, suffered not even a word of disapproval from people who are professionally politically correct. All must hang together, seems to be the murky esprit de corps and the man at the centre of it all is Mandelstein. The two men I love most in the world, he once remarked, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. What kind of shit is that? Like the photo-opp at Belsen, what sort of a man would consider a gay trio to be a good idea?

The most powerful man in NewLabour, it seems, isn't Brown, or Campbell but Mandy. Given that Peter, The Lord Crabs, has no power base to speak of in the national or even parliamentary party, given that he is twice disgraced and given that his is a more exotic, youth-friendly lifstyle than that of, say, Alan Bennett, one must wonder what the fuck is going on and what has been going on among this unsavoury gang that the Godfather, the powerbroker, the fixer is not a dyed in the wool party man or woman but a former TV producer with a penchant for Brazilian rentboys and Russian gangsters? The Joint Prime Minister, cruising on the global gay scene. What sort of a Project is this, for North Eastern tough guys, like Campbell?

Is it this compact with gay Machiavelli which troubles family man, boozer, thug and headbanger Campbell? Is the Blair court and the Brown catastrophe more decadent than his own feeble, stocking-tops fairy stories; has he found himself, in moments of cold, bright reality, living not in a campaigning, egalitarian Camelot Nouvelle but in a real-life snuff movie, bound-to, attracted by, locked-into, lusting after the killers, a killer himself?

Poor, fucked-up Ali Campbell. Even for football types, real men, like him, boozers and shouters, there are worse things than being gay. He's a thicko, his writing is dire and even if it wasn't, it is reviled around the world. What can he do? With each fresh outburst of self-justification his family must despise him the more. And even from his early days at Forum he's been a rotten, cowardly phoney, soft porn, the very idea, what's the point of that? What's the poor man to do?

Grown men, real men, regardless of their position in life, don't do this stuff, this parcelling-up of a pack of lies and then thinking they can browbeat people into believing black is white, day is night, war is peace and Campbell looks ridiculous, insisting that his cribbed and copied horseshit really was the Real McCoy, bleating that it is too, too horrid of people to point out that everythung he said was shit.

Sailed too close, did Campbell, dazzled by Gay Power, and the rest of the cabal has moved on, untouchable. really; but everyone keeps going on about the dodgy dossier, his porno tour de force. If he was right in there with them, that would be one thing, exciting, maybe, meeting Russian bum bandits with all the money in the world. But a bit of football, a bit of charity, a shitty book and the bilious looks of common-law-wife and kids, it's hardly Last Exit To Brooklyn, A Hundred And Twenty Days Of Sodom, is it?

He took his orders from this Odd
Trio and now he finds himself, rich but tearful, famous but despised, in the heterosexual wilderness, cracking-up on telly, like a discarded member of last year's boy band.

He could always make a clean breast, say he was corrupted by more sophisticated men, for that, in truth, is what happened; far too stupid, far too soft core, Campbell, for all this shit. He should put his hands up. And come out. There's no law against it.